


hold fast to the turning earth

by oogaboogu



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dæmons, Multi, Murphy-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-12
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:00:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23106622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oogaboogu/pseuds/oogaboogu
Summary: ‘They want a murderer. We'll give them one. What does it matter to him? He’s already half-dead!’
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/John Murphy, Clarke Griffin/Lexa, Octavia Blake/Lincoln
Comments: 28
Kudos: 134





	1. the makings of monsters

**Author's Note:**

> PLEASE READ: there is non-consensual dæmon touching in this, which in HDM canon carries some sexual assault connotations — please stay safe.
> 
> A dæmon is the physical manifestation of someone's soul outside of their body in the form of an animal companion. If they die, their human dies, and vice versa. Children's dæmons can freely change form up until puberty, at which point they "settle" into a permanent shape. Separation from one's dæmon causes extreme physical pain and emotional distress. Dæmons are generally the opposite sex from their human, and it is taboo to touch another person's dæmon. I think I have covered the basics here but if not just let me know!
> 
> The incredible hopskipaway made the most gorgeous moodboard for this fic on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hopskipaway/status/1243378187914170368?s=20 !!! which is just stunning and deserves to be showered in love!!!

‘They want a murderer. We'll give them one. What does it matter to him? He’s already half-dead!’

They wouldn’t, would they? Would they? He wanted to get sick, but he didn’t. Instead, he stepped into the barrel of her gun just to feel the press of it against his heart. 

‘Go to hell, Raven,’ he said, but his voice split down the middle. He wanted to say something else — _How dare you? How could you?_ — but he was floored by the awful, dizzying feeling that she was right.

He _was_ a murderer. And he _was_ half-dead. Everyone knew it. Nobody could look at him. Nobody could touch him. Nobody could bear it. Even now, as he approached her, Raven flinched, and Argo hissed, eyes flashing, wings outstretched in warning.

Then, Finn slapped Raven's gun away. As he did, Elsie growled up at Argo, her usually jolly demeanour vanished, ears flat and snout furrowed with fury, and Argo shrank back, hiding his face in Raven’s ponytail.

Bellamy and Clarke said their piece, but Murphy didn't care to listen whether or not they, too, thought him better off dead; his stomach was in knots; his throat aching with swallowed tears; his head resounding with horror; hollow, numb. _Missing._

Raven wanted to kill him. She would kill him for something he didn't even do.

The ringing in Murphy's ears faded. He blinked away tears. To his immense gratitude, neither Juno nor Ajax said a word, though it was pretty clear they came down on Bellamy and Clarke's side. He was glad for their silence, if only for the fact that he would have hated them to speak up for him — as if they knew what she would've done, what she would've said. As if they could ever stand in for what he lacked.

He still felt sick and unreal as he climbed the ladder to the upper floor.

Murphy was already walking around Camp Jaha like a pariah. _There goes the murderer,_ came the whispers. _There goes the monster. Look; he doesn't have a heart. Look; he doesn't have a soul_.

But he hadn't mown down an entire village. Connor and Myles had gleefully strung him up to die, and yeah, maybe killing them had been a bad idea. Maybe killing them had been a terrible thing to do. Maybe he wouldn't have done it if she wasn't— if he still—

He pressed his forehead against the cool metal of the wall, and let out a long, shaking breath, and felt the now-familiar ache twist and settle somewhere between his lungs. Maybe they were right. Maybe he had become monstrous without her. Maybe he was better off dead than like this: half-alive and half-made and entirely grotesque, missing his central piece. Men like him existed only in nightmares, only in old zombie films or horror-pictures buried deep in the archives of the Ark.

Murphy managed to pull himself together eventually, like he always did. Sitting by the jagged hole he had blown in the side of the dropship afforded him a perfect view of Finn handing himself over to the grounders that surrounded their old camp. He felt nothing at that except faint, faded comfort; at least it wasn't him. He let Raven and Clarke cry and rage and leave without him, Bellamy following close behind, tight-lipped and angry and sparing not one glance back, and he felt nothing.

Maybe they were right about him.

Instead of following the others, Murphy stayed out for a while longer. Leaning his head against the cool metal until the sky went dark overhead, he focused all his mental energies on the raw void, the empty place between his lungs, his hands, the cold chill on the back of his bare neck where she ought to be, curled up, fuzzy-warm, nosing under his chin. Nothing, of course. If she was still out there, he couldn't feel her. If she was still out there, he couldn't know.

She was gone. He was alone. A man without a head; a man without a soul.

* * *

He kept slipping between feeling awake and asleep, and his ears felt hot. The darkness closed around him, threatening to swallow him, but he stumbled on. He was going back to camp. Maybe they would kill him. Maybe they wouldn't. Maybe she was there — maybe that's where she had went.

She was _gone_. His mind kept turning over it. It felt impossible; a nightmare, not something that happened to real people. He had never been alone before in his life, not like this. They had taken her from him. Why didn't they just kill him? Why didn't they just kill them both? He took a step and it felt jagged in his temples, his ribs, in his knees.

It occured to him that he might be delirious, though the events of the past few days had dulled any panic he might have felt over it. Camp. He needed to get to the dropship. He needed to find her.

He couldn't feel her anymore; that warm and secret place both within and without him, the place she had been his whole life, was hollow and raw and bleeding. Void. Like space, sucking his father and his dæmon out through the doors and eating them alive, turning her to stardust, freezing his skin and popping his brain and crushing the air from his lungs. Gone.

Murphy couldn't feel her anymore, and underneath the pulsing wound of it, he hoped she couldn't feel him, either — for all he was now was afraid and so terribly alone.

Something tripped him up in the dark. His body fell heavily to the ground, scratching hard against his red nubs of fingertips, his tender palms, his burned and bloodied knees. He rolled onto his back, tried to sit up. He heard shouts. A light glared in his face. Blinded, he lifted a hand to block it.

The gasp cut through the night air. ‘Murphy?’

Octavia, he thought.

Then, sharper, a touch of hysteria, a drenching of fear:

‘ _Where’s his dæmon_?’

* * *

Nobody would touch him. Octavia had helped him up and to the dropship, but the others had flinched away whenever he came too close. He didn't blame them; he was sure he would have done the same thing in their shoes. He had felt too ill to care anyway, for the horrified gasps, the whispers, the sounds of somebody retching against the side of a tree at the sight of him. Now he felt too ill to care when the cool press of a damp cloth to his throbbing temple stirred him out of his daze, a daze he didn't quite remember sinking into.

‘Hey.’ Clarke had that look she got, the half-hard, half-soft look that made her such a compelling leader. _I’m only telling you what to do because I care about you_ , the look said. Murphy wanted to laugh at that. Next to her, Ajax shifted from foot to foot, warm brown feathers ruffled.

He was a golden eagle. It had never mattered to Murphy before, what type of eagle Ajax was, but now it seemed terribly important. His golden-brown feathers looked marvellously soft; thick down circled his clawed feet. On some sort of sick impulse, Murphy almost reached out to touch him, to put his raw and broken hand into the softness of those feathers.

He managed to stop himself at the last moment, and his stomach, empty as it was, seemed to wrench. He really was feeling sick now, and too hot, and he missed the touch of _her_ even more, so much it hurt, her soft sleek fur and nuzzling nose, missed the way when he was sick she would always press up against his chest or drape herself around his neck. He missed her being there. Her absence felt wrong, wrong, wrong, all the way down to his bones; the tingling of a phantom limb, when he clearly saw the stump.

Clarke was still dabbing at his forehead. He raised his hand to push her away; she grabbed ahold of his palm, her eyes gone wide, the blue of them heightened, sharpened, by his fuzzy filter of his fever. Then he realised that she had seen his fingers.

Her grip was firm but her already pale face had blanched further. ‘Murphy, what did they—’

Then, Bellamy came stomping into the room. He seemed about to say something, before he stopped dead. Juno let out a sharp short growl of horror, and shuddered. Murphy was already getting sick of people looking at him like that. Like he was a waking nightmare, curled in the corner, knees to his chest.

Bellamy shook his head, mouth open, attempting to find the words. 'Where’s his—’

‘I told you, Bell!’ Octavia cried, just a step behind him, her falcon-dæmon flapping wildly above her head. ‘His dæmon is gone.’

‘Christ,’ said Bellamy, and for a moment he seemed entirely lost for words. ‘How—’

They were interrupted just then by Murphy, whose stomach decided to abruptly up-end itself within him. He jerked free from Clarke’s grip to vomit. Blood spattered scarlet onto the dropship’s steel floor, red strings of spit trailing from his trembling mouth. His head felt fit to split open with the pressure.

She wasn't here at the dropship, she was not anywhere to be found — but Murphy's missing head, missing heart, missing soul, suddenly felt the very least of his problems.

* * *

Even when all he offered was cups of water and a helping hand to the sick, none of them wanted to look at him. None of them would let his skin brush their own, as if it was more than just the fever that was catching, as if he was planning on stealing their dæmon for his own. Bellamy pushed him away in the throes of fear and delirium, and he tried not to let it sting. He had kicked the crate out from beneath his feet, so why was this the thing that threatened to finally shatter whatever husk was left of Murphy's broken heart?

* * *

‘Where is your dæmon, John?’ Clarke’s mom asked him, horrified. She didn’t have to ask his name, so she must have remembered him from when he had been little; tiny and terrified and ill and peering out between his chubby little fingers as Jaha pulled the lever and opened the doors that sucked his father into cold empty space and Ríona into one last gasp of stardust. She had watched and done nothing to stop it.

‘Gone,’ he told her.

They focused their attention on Raven after that, but Murphy saw how they tried not to touch him, how they barely helped him limp out of the dropship, how even steadfast Doctor Abby Griffin avoided his eye like her own dæmon would be stolen from her by the mere sight of the boy with none.

Then Bellamy came flying in a blur of rage, his wolf hot at his heels. The first time somebody touched him since Clarke had stitched up his wounds, and it was Bellamy’s fist, slamming hard against his jaw. He flattened him to the ashen ground with a hard thump, the pain jagged in his thigh where he had been stabbed, and he almost screamed from the weight of another human being pressing him into the burned earth; a forcible reminder that he was real, after all. Juno snarled in his ear.

He supposed he probably deserved it.

Somebody tore Bellamy off, and every place where his skin had been touching Murphy’s tingled and ached. But Sive was gone, and his hands were, as always, utterly empty of comfort.

* * *

‘And you wouldn’t have, because you’re better than me,’ he said, voice flat.

Bellamy’s gaze was cutting, and Juno’s teeth gleamed.

So he did it. He said it. It came out in a jumble of words, his cheeks hot, his chest sore.

‘They promised they would give her back.’

Two pairs of eyes — one set brown, one set yellow — settled on his own. He drew his knees up to his chest and clenched his hands into fists. ‘On the third day, night, whatever,’ he said, ‘they took her. And they didn't just take her, they—’

Juno’s hackles were raised. ‘They _touched_ her,’ she said, in her low rumble of a voice. ‘Their dæmons didn’t take her. The people did. They touched her.’

He nodded, swallowing hard. He remembered how it felt. He still felt the ghost of it sometimes; hands where they could not be, where they should not be, the twist and the tear of it, the wrongness somewhere deep in his gut.

‘They took her from me. You know her, she’s not like you, Juno, she’s not big enough to fight them. She tried though. She nearly bit one of their fingers clean off. But she couldn’t get free. And the feeling of it— it’s so hard to think, to do anything, when they’ve got their hands on you, when they—’

Bellamy didn’t say anything, a furrow in his brow, but as Murphy watched, his hand reached out and settled in the thick black fur between Juno’s shoulders. She inched closer to him, ears flattened in horror, but listening.

So Murphy continued: ‘They carried her away. And further, and further. I begged and begged, but they wouldn’t stop, and it hurt—it was the worst thing I’ve ever felt—worse than anything that had come before—worse than the fingernails and the burning and the beating. I think I might have passed out. I couldn’t see. All I could feel was her being torn away, like—like they were pulling out my guts through my mouth. I heard her crying, and I knew how afraid she was. It never stopped, the pain. They kept carrying her further and further away. I think… I think they thought it would kill me. Next thing I knew, it was morning. She was gone. It still hurt, but more like... like an absence, like something was missing, but I could—I could still feel their hands on her, even when she was so far away. They told me that they would bring her back if I told them everything. They said they would give her back. So I did. I told them everything they wanted to know. They didn’t bring her back. They just—they laughed. I woke up that evening and the door to my cage was open. I ran.’

He felt drained, drained even of his own anger, like all of him had been hollowed out and scraped clean. He looked between Bellamy and Juno, and he said, ‘You try choosing between your soul and the people who strung you up to die for something you didn’t do, then banished you for it. You try having Juno torn away from you, and then you sit there and you tell me that you wouldn’t have done the same, Bellamy. You tell me that you wouldn't do anything, _anything,_ to save her. _'_

Bellamy scoffed and rolled his eyes. Juno did not. Her yellow gaze never lifted from Murphy. Her hackles stayed raised and her ears still lay flat and frightened on top of her head.

And Bellamy did not lift his hand from her fur.

* * *

He went with Finn not only because Bellamy had asked him to, but because there was the hope — the faint, treacherous hope — that maybe if the grounders had Clarke and the others, they might have _her_ , too. He hadn’t felt her in weeks, not since he woke to his own gargled screams one night at the dropship, when he felt again the grasp of hands around a chest that wasn’t his, but may as well have been. It was overwhelming, the feeling that something private, something only for him, was being prodded and poked and examined—driving all other thoughts out of his head. He couldn’t be sure if it was real or nightmare, that ghostly grip around his heart, but he had spent the night getting sick into the bushes behind the dropship and hoping, in his brief flashes of lucidity, that nobody heard him.

Now, he almost wished for that back. It would be better than the radio silence, the nothingness, the empty space where she ought to have been. He followed Finn and Elsie and Elsie’s keen nose and wagging red tail, his grip trembling around the gun Bellamy had so _generously_ given him, his palms raw and bleeding where the red seatbelt had cut into them. An ache was beginning to settle in between his shoulders, and he kept hearing Juno’s howl echo in his ears; rocks kicked out from underneath Bellamy's flailing feet to clatter against the hard, unforgiving stone metres and metres below.

He didn’t want Bellamy to die. He had, in the moment — barely able to stay standing and being tugged hopelessly down to the cliff’s edge — been so afraid of letting go, letting Bellamy — brown eyes and brown curls — cruelty and kindness — _Bellamy_ — splatter red and Juno gold at the bottom of the cliff.

He had so been afraid Bellamy would die.

It made him want to laugh. He’d only tried to kill him himself a few days earlier. He'd only have been too happy to shut that damned overgrown dog up, to close those eyes forever, to—

But Murphy wasn't the monster they said he was. Not entirely, not completely. And he hadn't wanted Bellamy to die.

And then Bellamy had given him the gun; a careful truce if ever there could be one.

And now, maybe, maybe, maybe, Clarke was with _her_. Maybe she was talking right now to Ajax, her dark eyes glimmering, her nose twitching, her head in her paws. Maybe, maybe, maybe, within the day, the hour, he would hold her tight to his chest and promise her he was never going to let her go ever again.

* * *

When Finn wouldn't listen even to Elsie, that was when Murphy knew there was no hope for him. More importantly, that was when he knew there was no hope for the villagers—the villagers, who huddled by the fence and kept their dæmons close. He ignored the way they stared at him as if he had no head. Even a fool could see that, dæmon or none, he wasn't the threat here.

Better have no dæmon at all, than to be like Finn now; Elsie might have well been invisible. 

She leapt in a desperate attempt to knock the gun out of his hands before he started firing. She missed.

The villagers fell in a rattle of rifle-fire and so many brief hurricanes of gold.

* * *

They pardoned him and Finn both, but still nobody would talk to him, and nobody would touch him. He walked around the camp and people flinched. He wondered if, slowly, he was becoming the monster they always said he was. He wondered, because Finn had had his dæmon while he cut down children in a spray of bullets, and Murphy hadn’t needed his dæmon to scream and beg for him to stop.

He caught Clarke looking at him, her gaze like steel. ‘Just because the council pardoned you,’ she said, 'doesn't mean I have.’

He shrugged, and took another sip of his moonshine, and wondered for the hundredth, thousandth time, what his little black soul would have to say about this whole thing.

Sometimes, when the horror of the thing faded for long enough, he found time to miss her so badly it made him sick.

* * *

And now:

Now he watched Elsie go up in a burst of gold, and now he heard Raven’s agonised wails and Argo’s broken _kee-ah!_ and he wondered how anything could ever be OK, ever again. Clarke held out her arm for Ajax to land. She struck a strange and lonely figure in the clearing by the stake, with blood on her hands and her dæmon’s wings spread and head bent.

‘It is done!’ the Commander cried, her great vicious white tigress of a dæmon roaring the enraged grounders into submission, and he wondered how many dæmons she had stolen, how many hearts she had torn warm and beating free from the ribs of men and women and children who dared stand in her way.

He envied Finn and Elsie their short clean death. At least they had gone together, like was true, real, natural. At least Finn hadn't been alone.

* * *

Baby fluttered around her cage for hours before she tired herself out, and even then she couldn't snatch even a moment of sleep. She thought of Lincoln, her dear darling Lincoln, and of spirited Apollo, and she thought of Octavia who was becoming as precious to her as Lincoln was, and she wanted to scream, trapped here in this cage, powerless to help, staring down the face of her own death and the madness of her other half. She had caught a glimpse of the other room filled with cages in passing; there, at least, people were kept in the cage next to their dæmons. There, at least, they could be together as they died. There were no humans in this room; only dæmons, all in varying states of decay, some bleeding gold, others barely more than shadows, all of them lost and alone.

'Hey,' she said to the resident of the cage next to her. 'Will I feel it, when they turn him into a Reaper?'

The black animal raised her head, and looked at her dully. Baby thought she wasn't going to answer her, until she saw the dæmon shake her head, ears flickering. 'I don't speak Grounder. You're gonna have to ask me that again.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Juno (Bellamy) - grey wolf  
> Ajax (Clarke) - golden eagle  
> Apollo (Octavia) - peregrine falcon  
> Argo (Raven) - kea  
> Elsie (Finn) - red setter dog  
> "Fang" (Lexa) - white tiger
> 
> In HDM it is never (to my knowledge) explained why some people have same-sex dæmons. Some people have theorised that it means those with a same-sex dæmon are LGBT or more generally gender-non-conforming. I personally think that might be too simplistic an explanation, and in this universe people with same-sex dæmons can be of any gender identity and sexual orientation. Lexa's dæmon in this fic is female not on account of Lexa's being a lesbian but literally just because *holds up potato* I thought it would be neat.
> 
> (Whispers: thank you so much for reading. Next chapter coming when I get my act together)


	2. to give a star a name

Considering the grounders were the ones who had taken his dæmon from him in the first place, Murphy really didn't think it was fair that they, too, had to look at him like he was a mutant who had sprouted a second and infinitely uglier head. Like he was something grotesque.

Octavia, who was now apparently a grounder expert, assured him that had any of them actually _had_ his dæmon, they would have returned her.

'They only separated you to make you talk, or to kill you, or both,’ she said, flatly. ‘And it worked, or, well, half-worked. If they didn't return her after that, it’s probably because she took off, or got stuck somewhere. They’re not savages.’

‘That is so comforting, Octavia,’ he said, sardonic and blithe, pretending like he didn't want to throttle her for presuming that Sive would ever have taken off and left him, or for presuming, by the light, careless way she explained it to him, that she thought he didn’t care. That he _was_ a monster, dæmonless by choice and not by circumstance.

‘Reapers don’t have dæmons, either,’ she said. ‘That’s probably why they're looking at you like that. Or maybe,’ and her voice grew hard, ‘they remember you from TonDC.’

He got up and left without a word. He couldn't hear one more thing about TonDC without wanting to scream. He still saw the dumb kid with the still-unsettled dæmon running at Finn, running towards his own death, every single time he closed his eyes, like the scene had been branded upon the insides of his eyelids. He still heard Elsie’s pained yowl as she disintegrated into golden smoke at Clarke’s hand, echoing in his dreams. He didn't need Octavia blaming him for TonDC, and for everything that had come afterwards. 

He was just as loathed for the things he didn't do as he was for the things he did. So what, if he did what he had to do to survive? Octavia didn't need to know that survival had stopped feeling like it was enough the very day Sive was torn away from him, that every day survival seemed less and less important if he was to survive alone. Octavia didn't need to know that. Nobody did.

* * *

‘What do you think they do with the dæmons?’ Bellamy asked, only a few hours into their hike to Mount Weather. Juno marched ahead, ears pricked for danger. Lincoln’s dæmon was wherever all the Reaper’s dæmons were, or lost forever; he hadn't spoken of it, just like he hadn't spoken of his time as a Reaper, but Bellamy couldn’t imagine how it must have felt to have her torn away.

Even Murphy — who was probably psychopathic, and had also been dæmonless for much longer than Lincoln — still woke screaming for his lost soul in the dead of night. Bellamy knew this because he had heard his yells, even if Murphy was making a concentrated effort to hide it, sleeping apart from the others, and careful to keep his blanket tucked close over his mouth to muffle himself, just in case.

(Bellamy chose not to dwell on whatever it was that drove him to check on Murphy in the middle of the night, that drove him to listen to those screams, that burned him up with shame and regret. That was besides the point.)

(Bellamy thought that Murphy wasn’t actually a psychopath at all.)

He wondered idly what he would do if Juno was ever— No. It didn't bear thinking about.

Lincoln shook his head. He seemed so much smaller now than he had before, which was strange, considering that his dæmon had been a little blue butterfly that could sit comfortably atop a man’s fingertip; by all rights her absence shouldn't have reduced Lincoln’s hulking presence as dramatically as it had done. Bellamy had always wondered how a man so imposing could have a dæmon so, well, _delicate._ When Lincoln and Octavia were together, it must have seemed laughable that Lincoln owned the butterfly and O the falcon—well, laughable to anyone who didn't actually know Octavia, of course.

‘I don't know. Experiment on them?’ Lincoln’s voice was bleak. ‘Baby’s stronger than she looks, though.’

‘Baby?’ Bellamy asked. ‘Octavia told me that isn't her real name.’

‘I think it’s very strange,’ Lincoln said, raising an eyebrow at Bellamy, ‘that the sky-people so carelessly give away the names of their souls to just anyone who asks, yet they think _us_ to be savages. It’s a complex thing, a dæmon’s name. It’s not something you just… tell people. It has power. Only… only Octavia knows my dæmon’s true name.’

‘You trust her,’ said Bellamy. ‘That’s why you gave her the name.’

Lincoln looked over at him. ‘I love her,’ he said. ‘That’s why.’

There was a long beat of silence, until Bellamy said, ‘Okay. But, why _Baby_?’

Lincoln smiled a little. ‘Baby’s just what people used to call her, when we were little and she was unsettled. She always took the form of small animals. Don't know why. It used to make my father furious; he wouldn't speak to us for a week after she settled as a butterfly.’

Bellamy laughed. ‘Her being a butterfly sure made it easier for us to tie you up in the dropship, though,’ he said.

‘You kept her in a _jar_ ,’ said Lincoln.

‘Hey, we did poke a few air-holes in the lid,’ said Bellamy.

Lincoln cracked a smile, and for a brief moment Bellamy forgot what they were trekking towards, and what they were trekking away from. Then, the two of them remembered. The mood soured. A cloud passed overhead.

‘Somehow, I doubt the Mountain Men have given her the same treatment,’ said Lincoln, darkly.

They marched on in silence after that.

* * *

‘In here,’ said Maya, eyes wide with fright, holding open a heavy steel door. Bellamy dragged Lovejoy’s body through it, while Juno followed, still trembling, a low growl sounding from deep in her belly.

The room was filled with cage upon cage of dæmons, and all of them were still and silent. Some looked near death. Others foamed gold at the mouth. Some of the cages were still locked, but empty. None of the dæmons could speak. None of them even moved as Bellamy and Juno and Maya and her dæmon dragged a dead body through the door. They weren't like the dæmons in the other cages. They were—

There was something _wrong_ with them.

‘Juno?’ Bellamy watched as his own dæmon looked around, ears standing straight up in fright, and then —a yelp, a stumble, a snarl of shock: ‘ _Bellamy_!’— headed straight for one of the cages at the end. He had no choice but to follow, as her bond tugged him forward, Maya and her little ladybug following close behind. They left Lovejoy’s body to cool on the ground.

‘This is where they keep the Reaper’s dæmons,’ said Maya, slow and uncertain and guilty. Juno shook her head so roughly her entire shaggy coat shook with it. The ladybug, whose name Bellamy didn't know, fluttered his little wings in silent distress.

‘No— it’s Sive,’ said Juno. ‘Bell, look, it’s _Sive_.’

‘Sive?’ questioned Maya, her voice squeaky with fright.

The dæmon at the end looked up at the sound of her name, and immediately Bellamy recognised her. Immediately, Bellamy knew.

‘Bellamy?’ Sive whispered, leaning forward, her paws against the bars of the cage. Her black eyes were round as buttons, and her triangles of ears pricked, as if she couldn't believe what she was seeing or what she was hearing. ‘Bellamy and Juno — is it really you?’

* * *

Bellamy remembered:

Murphy's raw choking, his body swinging where he dangled, bloody in the face, kicking his legs wildly, as if he could thrash free from death. As if, if he put up enough of a fuss, death would decide that he wasn't worth the effort.

That was the worst bit. In all of the sound and fury and horror of the murderous mob, the chanting, the way he could still feel his own foot kicking the crate out from under the kid who he had once considered to be something like a friend—that was what Bellamy couldn't look away from. The thrashing. The horrible heaving breaths. The terror of the dying. It distilled the chaos all around into one terrible focal point, a centre, like the draw of some nightmarish magnet. He couldn't look away from it even if he tried.

Juno howled next to him.

Murphy’s dæmon fought like a wildcat in the jaws of Connor's bulldog. He didn't know the name of the animal from which she took her form, but she looked a little like a small black weasel; no match for the iron jaws of Connor’s dog. She bled gold around his teeth, yowling in terror. Connor’s dog shook her in her mouth like she would a rag-doll, a toy, a piece of rope. It made Bellamy feel sick.

Still Juno howled.

And Charlotte’s dæmon was a little tufted deer that stood next to her on trembling legs, a tufted deer like Wells’ dæmon Iphigenia had been, and Bellamy didn't stop to wonder why Charlotte’s dæmon had taken that form until her tremulous little voice cut through all the noise and the terror like oil cut through water.

‘Murphy didn't kill Wells. I did!’

Sive twisted free of Connor’s bulldog’s teeth, great horrible gashes tearing open her side, bleeding golden ichor. She leapt for Murphy, clung onto him where he hanged, idly now, swinging, eyes closed, no breath, and she squealed and tried to chew through the seatbelt, black fur running gold.

Clarke slammed the axe against the tree. Murphy fell to the ground with a heavy thump. Bellamy remembered all of it. Murphy surged up off the ground and took that awful wheeze of a breath and then grabbed Sive to his chest and clung to her as if he would never let her go again.

Death, if he was there, retreated back into the trees and out of sight.

* * *

Sive was pretty sure she had forgotten what it felt like to exist within more than one and a half square feet of space. She leapt out of her cage as soon as Bellamy and the ladybug-girl got it open, and felt dizzy with lack of practice. She landed roughly on the ground and trilled out a laugh—because she was _free_. She was out, she might see him again, might press her face to his shoulder and climb atop his head and pull his hair with her teeth just because she knew how much it annoyed him, and this endless nightmare would finally be over.

‘Hey,’ Bellamy laughed a little. ‘Good to stretch your legs?’ His mouth was covered in blood. Juno looked shaken. Sive stopped long enough to ask, ‘Wait. What the hell are you two doing here, Juno, Bellamy?’

‘Getting our people out, Sive,’ said Bellamy.

'They're harvesting them for their blood. They almost harvested _us_ ,’ said Juno. 'How did _you_ end up in here?’

Sive felt her face pull back into a snarl, almost involuntarily. ‘They took me from him. The grounders. It was—’ she stopped, and shuddered, and took a moment to breathe through her clenched teeth. ‘We were in the woods, and I didn't know what was happening. Every step was further from him. It— it hurt. Then, men in gas masks came. I don't remember much after that. I woke up in a cage, and John and the grounders were gone.’ She looked between Bellamy and Juno. ‘Where is he?’

‘He’s back at the camp,’ Bellamy said. ‘The Ark came down. We’re trying to organise a truce with the grounders.’

‘ _What_?’

‘Yeah, Murphy likes it as much as you do,’ said Bellamy, wry.

Her voice went quiet. ‘How is he?’

Bellamy smiled thinly. ‘Oh, he’s himself.’

‘He’s also me, thank you very much Bellamy,’ said Sive, sharply, and if she hadn't been so happy to see Bellamy she was certain she’d have said something she would regret — there was something poisonous bubbling underneath her skin. Bellamy did look a little abashed, and Juno ducked her head a little, but Sive still felt restless with anger. If Bellamy had never banished them, if Bellamy had never kicked the crate—

Suddenly keen to change the subject, Sive nodded towards the dead body in the corner. ‘So what happened to that guy? And—and why are you in a _diaper_?’ (Sive was secretly tempted to amend that statement to: why do you look _good_ in a diaper? but she was fairly sure that, had she done so, in the event of her ever seeing John again he would never forgive her.)

They heard a noise; a rattle of a cage, perhaps a creak of old concrete—but Bellamy raised his hand to cut Sive off. ‘I’m gonna get changed and get the body out of here—we’ll fill you in when we’ve got time.’

‘Okay, but—one last thing,’ said Sive, hopping a little on her four feet with pent-up energy. ‘That dæmon,’ she turned her head towards the cage next to her own, where a faded little butterfly lay, utterly still but for the odd twitch of antennae. ‘She’s… sick, again, but before this she was okay and she said she knows your sister, Bellamy. She says that she's the dæmon of a grounder called Lincoln.’

‘Lincoln?’ Bellamy’s face hardened. He looked at the butterfly, lying silent and grey on the floor of her cage. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Well, we can't do anything for her right now. Come on.’

Bellamy made quick work of changing into the dead man's clothes and cleaning the blood from his face; both he and Juno dragged the body then to the rubbish chute. Sive had watched the men in this facility dump so many dead grounders in there like they were little more than garbage; she cared very, _very_ little for the grounders, but still she felt there was a sick sort of justice in dumping the man’s body in the same unceremonious way. The girl, though, looked near tears. Her ladybug was buzzing around her head, and she was wringing her hands incessantly.

‘Hey,’ Sive said. ‘I don't know you. Who are you?’

‘Maya,’ said the girl. ‘And this is—’

‘Winston,’ said the ladybug. He landed on the floor in front of Sive. ‘I’m… I’m sorry for what we've been doing to you. Where is your person? He must be recovered from the drug, if you’re this well.’

‘What drug? The drug that makes the rest of them so sick?’ Sive nodded to the other cages, to the silent, listless dæmons. ‘I’ve never gotten sick like they have. I’ve felt drunk a few times, but that's it. And I think I know which drug is responsible for that.’

Sometimes, privately, she had wondered if they were better off than she was. The dæmons in the cages. They were so _unbothered_ by the whole thing. They barely moved, didn't speak, eyes blank and mouths sighing out puffs of gold. She knew they were dying, that they were decaying, that they were rotting alive like the living dead, but… it didn't look like it hurt. Sive had spent weeks alternating between extreme boredom and extreme misery. She had almost longed for whatever oblivion those poor creatures were dosed up on. She had almost longed to lay still and forget about John and the wrongness of being apart, even for just a day, an hour. Sometimes, when she was really low, she had wondered if he was even looking for her, if he even missed her. Sometimes, when she was really low, she wondered if the two of them wouldn't be better off dead. But then she remembered John’s mother, remembered Gwaine stumbling around their tiny metal apartment on the Ark as if _he_ were the one with the bottle to his mouth, snapping at her, snapping at John, snapping at everything. And she was enough like Gwaine already. 

But it got lonely; so lonely sometimes that it made her feel half-dead herself. The butterfly, Baby, who for some reason, wouldn't tell Sive her actual name (‘It’s our custom,’ she had said. ‘Only Lincoln can give you my true name, if he so chooses.’) had only been coherent for a few days before falling back into the same awful stupor the other dæmons had been afflicted with. Sive had wondered how long it would be before she went entirely mad. She nearly broke her teeth when she tried to chew through the steel wire that hemmed her in. She wondered if someday she’d go mad enough that she wouldn't care. If she wouldn't care that she'd broken her teeth and smashed in her skull trying to get free, all to be released from this endless silence, her world shrunk to one-and-a-half square feet and only the occasional bloodless corpse dragged across the floor and dumped down the rubbish chute to break the monotony.

She missed him—she missed him endlessly, hopelessly, incessantly—but she was so glad she was here instead of him. He wouldn't be able to stand being alone for so long. He’d go cuckoo, if all he had to do was to sit and stew in his own poisonous thoughts.

‘They’ve all been turned into Reapers,’ said Bellamy, snapping Sive out of her reverie.

‘Thank you Bellamy. That explains everything,’ she said, dryly, hopping up atop one of the empty cages so that she didn't have to look _up_ at him so much.

She hadn't meant to be funny, but she saw Bellamy crack a reluctant grin anyway, and she felt something warm stir in her belly. She knew they were still all in terrible danger, but what was new, really? And besides, she was no longer in a tiny cage. There were people to talk to. It was the happiest she had felt in weeks. ‘You really are just like him,’ Bellamy said. ‘Anyway. Come on, Maya, Sive. I need to radio Raven, and we need to make a plan.’

* * *

‘I think I’ll stay,’ said Murphy. He looked between Jaha, and the rag-tag little group he’d assembled, and he wanted to throw it all to the wind. He _could_ throw it all to the wind. Take off. Tell the camp and the grounders and their wars and their politics to kiss his ass.

But he’d never made a decision like that without her.

Even the decision to burn down the guard’s quarters—admittedly, not their finest moment—had been something they had chosen to do together. And every choice he had made since he had lost her—killing Connor and Myles, trying to kill Bellamy, even that stupid fight he had gotten into with the grounder—all of it had ended badly for him, had ended in blood. He hadn't even been able to stop Finn from murdering half a village. Everything he had done had made things worse, even when it wasn't his intention. He felt half-blinded without her, like everything he did was a fumble and a miss, too little, too late, or too much altogether. 

It _was_ tempting. Not Jaha and his City of Lights, or whatever—Murphy suspected losing his son had tipped that old fool over the edge entirely—but the thought of _leaving._ Forgetting all of it, all of the horror and the pain and the distrust. The cruelty. The feeling that everybody thought he’d had it all coming. The feeling that nobody cared about the kid with no dæmon, the same way they wouldn't care for the welfare of a ghost; there was no helping him now. He was a lost cause. But, treacherous in his chest, a little hope flickered all the same. And wherever Sive was, Murphy was certain it wasn't in Jaha’s fabled Light City.

‘She’s never coming back, John,’ Jaha hissed at him, eyes showing too much white, his strange new madness finally come to surface. Murphy involuntarily took a step back. ‘We’re going to a place where you don't need a dæmon to be complete. You can be whole again. Or would you rather stay as you are—bitter and hated and alone? She isn't coming back for you, John!’

Murphy swallowed, and shrugged, and he wondered just how obvious it was that he was faking nonchalance, that his uncaring facade was riddled with cracks. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. But she’s my dæmon, Jaha. I won't abandon her. I will never give up on her.’

He didn't think he could abandon her, even if he tried. The day he gave up on his soul, he thought, was the day he gave up on gravity, on the surety of the rising and setting of the sun. If he gave up on her, there would be nothing left to live for, nothing to believe in, nothing to hold him fast to the turning earth.

* * *

‘Maya borrowed the schematics of the vent system from her boss, and Sive’s been exploring them a little, but we’re still looking for a way in. Anything?’

Maya’s voice, slow and uncertain, hissed over the radio. ‘I think I found a path, but it's gonna be tight. Maybe too tight for both you and Juno, Bellamy. Here’s the walkie that you asked for.’

Raven turned to Clarke. ‘We’re gonna make him mobile, so he can talk to us from anywhere. Maybe Sive, too, if she can fit in the vents.’

Clarke nodded. ‘Bellamy, Sive, you have to find them. If you don't…’

If they didn't, they would all be killed. If they failed, all of this would have been for nothing. Clarke’s chest felt tight at the mere thought of it. As soon as Bellamy’s voice fizzled out over the radio, Clarke rose to go, to start making a plan, to fret about their friends, about the acid fog, to talk to Emerson or Indra or her mother or _something_ , but Raven raised her hand to stop her.

‘Wait, Clarke. What about Murphy? Has he turned up yet?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. Why?’ Clarke asked, her voice strained with impatience; she really felt like she had bigger issues right now than John Murphy, of all people.

‘I’ve been thinking—you can’t tell him that his dæmon’s in Mount Weather,’ Raven said. ‘He’ll go crazy. He’s a mess, Clarke, and he’ll just get messier if he knows she’s in danger and there's nothing he can do about it.’

‘I agree,’ said Ajax, sitting by the monitor. ‘There isn't anything he can do to help Sive, and nothing she can do for him. He’ll hate that. Maybe it's best that we don't throw that spanner in the works right now.’

‘Okay, whatever,’ Clarke said. ‘I won't tell him. Last I heard he’d started some fight. I don't even know where he is now.’

She rushed out the door, Ajax flapping close behind, and Argo and Raven watched them go.

Argo clucked a little. ‘You sure about this, Raven? We don't exactly owe him anything, but to not tell him about Sive…’

Raven swung back around to face the monitor. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Yeah, I am. You gotta be cruel to be kind, right? And, thanks to him, I know what it’s like to feel helpless.’

* * *

Sive found that her brand new hatred of enclosed spaces was not conducive to sneaking through vents. The walkie talkie strapped to her shoulders was surprisingly heavy, too, and she found herself sweating with the heat. Bellamy had had to work very hard to avoid touching her as he strapped the mobile radio to her torso, and the entire process had been full of snapped instructions from an increasingly impatient Raven, and Bellamy’s repeated insistence that he was not a genius mechanic and this was actually quite difficult and he’d like to see _her_ try and attach a radio to another man’s dæmon without touching her, as Juno suppressed a laugh at Sive’s dramatic eye-rolls. And, after all that, she _still_ couldn't figure out up from down and left from right in this damned labyrinth of ducts and vents, hot with circulating air and growing narrower and more claustrophobic with every step.

‘Still nothing,’ she said.

‘Keep looking,’ said Bellamy.

‘Wait,’ said Sive. ‘Do you hear that?’ She paused, cocked her head, swivelled her ears. She could hear... _drilling_?

‘I don't have the hearing of a sable, Sive, so no,’ said Bellamy, and she heard Raven laugh.

'I'm gonna follow it,’ said Sive. She could just about pinpoint which vent the sound was coming from, and as she hurried down, the drilling only grew louder and louder. ‘You know, Bellamy, you might be able to fit down here, but Juno, you would _hate_ it,’ she said, brightly, but she didn't hear their reply, because along with the drilling she could hear voices, and she was coming up to a vent, and—

‘Oh my God,’ she whispered.

‘What? What is it, Sive?’ said Bellamy.

‘They’re drilling into him— he’s dead, Bellamy, and—’

Sive felt silent as the doctor and the two men spoke, hoping that Bellamy and Raven could hear it. She pressed her chest to the vent, and held her breath. The voices echoed through the narrow chamber of the duct. Neither Bellamy nor Raven on the other ends made a sound.

She waited until the doctor wheeled the corpse out. He had been one of the 100; she couldn't remember his name, but he’d had a terrier for a dæmon. And now he was dead, and his terrier gone for good. She longed in that moment for John’s warm hands, to snuggle under his shirt and feel the beat of his heart, and know the two of them were alive. That they had each other.

But John wasn't here, so she shook the feeling away, and with a deep breath, pulled herself back together again. ‘Did you hear that?’ she whispered. ‘About the missile, and about Clarke?’

Her radio burst into sound, voices vying for attention. She took that as confirmation that they had, in fact, heard everything, and began to hurry her way back to Bellamy and Juno, her heart beating rapid-fire in her chest.

* * *

Fox had fallen asleep on Maya and Vincent’s couch, her cat dæmon curled up next to her.

‘Wouldn't it be funny,’ Sive whispered, ‘if her dæmon were a fox?’

‘I can imagine that might get old pretty quick, actually,’ said Bellamy, drily, and Juno snorted.

‘Maybe,’ said Sive. ‘I ended up pretty similar to John’s mom’s dæmon, so I don't know how much of it you can control. He was a stout.’

‘When did you settle?’ Juno asked sleepily.

Sive didn't look sleepy at all. ‘When we were twelve. The day we set fire to the guard’s quarters. The day we got arrested.’

‘I remember that,’ said Bellamy. ‘The whole of Farm Station had to be evacuated because of all the smoke.’

‘Oh yeah,’ said Sive, almost fondly. ‘What about you two, then?’

Bellamy sighed. ‘The day Octavia was born.’

Sive sat up straight, eyes round as buttons. ‘What? Weren't you only, like, six?!’

‘I was five, actually,’ said Bellamy. ‘Juno was bigger than I was.’

‘Only briefly,’ said Juno, one eye closed.

'That's crazy. That's so young. I mean, I thought twelve was pretty young, but that blows it out of the water,’ said Sive. ‘When we were five I convinced John to try and cut his own hair. He did such a bad job that his dad had to shave his head, and Mbege and Willa made fun of him for weeks.’

‘None of that surprises me in the least,’ said Juno.

‘Wherever he is,’ said Sive, ‘I just hope he's leaving his hair alone.’

Bellamy snorted. He felt sleepy himself, now, in Vincent Vie’s comfortable armchair, his comfortable apartment. He supposed he ought to snatch a few hours of sleep where he could, but by the restless way Sive’s tail was twitching, he doubted she would be dropping off anytime soon.

‘He’s wide awake, whereever he is,’ she said. ‘I think I’m gonna look around. I won't sleep until he does, so there's no point trying.’

Then, she rose from where she sat, cosied up to Juno, and leapt up to the armrest of the chair. She scampered across Bellamy’s lap, and casually, easily, _brushed against his hand_. She had disappeared out of sight and into the Vie family’s adjacent kitchen before Bellamy could say a thing, could even take in what had happened.

‘What was that?’ Bellamy asked Juno, aghast. ‘She… she _meant_ to do that— is she crazy?’

Juno barked a low laugh from where she sat at his feet. ‘You know, if it weren’t for me, you would be so stupid,’ she said. She didn't seem all that ruffled by the whole thing, which was almost the strangest part, considering another man’s dæmon had so casually touched the skin of her human half. ‘She’s _lonely_ , Bellamy. She's been alone for such a long time. I think…’ She was quiet for so long that Bellamy almost didn't expect her to finish. ‘I think she wanted to remember what it’s like.’

He nudged her with his foot. ‘What _what_ is like?’

Her yellowy eyes flickered up and caught his own in their sharp gaze. ‘The touch of a hand that doesn't mean to hurt.’

A beat of silence passed before Juno nuzzled into his thigh. Bellamy leaned down to scratch the soft fur behind Juno’s ears, and he didn't have to say a thing. She knew it all already.

‘It won't happen to us. I won't ever let that happen to us,’ he promised.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know, Bellamy.’

His hand was still tingling, like the dance of static, the feather touch of pins and needles, where Sive had brushed against it. He clenched it into a fist, then out again, stretching his fingers as though he could shake the feeling of her free.

‘Do you think we settled too soon, Junie?’ he asked her suddenly, so suddenly it surprised even himself.

He had never asked her that. They had never spoken about it. They had never spoken about that five year old boy on the Ark, who was so young, who loved stories and myths and playing gods and monsters, with the great big wolf dæmon that was as tall as he was. He was the first to settle in his year. He was the youngest settling in the Ark’s history.

‘No,’ said Juno. ‘I think we did what we had to do. I don't regret it— I’m proud of it. I’m proud of them.’

‘Yeah,’ said Bellamy, with the ghost of a smile. He was so proud of Octavia and Apollo that sometimes he thought he might burst with it.

‘But…’ Juno said, quiet, rumbly, ‘I don't regret it, but I think… I think we did all we could do. I think that now, we have to find something else. We should let them go. They’ll always be there. You’ll always be her brother, Bellamy. But their world is bigger now. And so is ours.’

‘I think you're right, Juno,’ he said. He opened and closed his fist again. He still felt his fingertips tingle.

She sniffed, and laid her shaggy head atop her paws. ‘I always am, Bell.’

Sive didn't reappear from her nosy around the Vie’s apartment that night, but when Bellamy woke the next morning, he found her cuddled into Juno’s side as if she’d been there all night long.

* * *

In the tent, after they had rallied their troops, after Clarke’s chest had risen and her heart surged with the promise of battle and the hope for victory, only she and Lexa remained. Lexa crouched to smear war-paint around Fang’s eyes.

'Do you want some, Ajax?’ Fang asked. Her voice was a lush husk of a thing that came from deep in her belly. Her long tail flicked back and forth constantly.

‘I don't think it's my colour,’ said Ajax. He had never shrunk underneath the tiger’s gaze, and he did not do any such thing now, his golden eye on her, his regal head cocked to one side.

‘Mm,’ said Fang. Her ear twitched, and she turned back to Lexa.

‘When you kissed me—’ Clarke started to say, or tried to, but Lexa cut her off with a shake of her head, her thick fountain of dark hair swishing. 

She stood up straight. ‘All done, Myrina.’

Fang — _Myrina_ — looked up in shock. The strange blue colour of her eyes stood out sharply in contrast to the black ash smeared around them, a jagged pattern that matched Lexa’s own. ‘You’re sure about this, Lexa,’ she said. It wasn't a question.

‘Time to go, Clarke, Ajax,’ was all Lexa said.

‘Lexa—’ Clarke felt breathless with shock, and with something else, a mixture of something that was a bit like fear and something that was nothing like fear at all.

Lexa paused at the flap of the tent, looking back over her shoulder, but avoiding Clarke’s eye.

‘I understand,’ Clarke said, thickly. She reached out for Ajax, settled her palm between his wings. ‘I understand what you just did. I won't… We won't _abuse_ it.’

‘I know you won’t,’ said Lexa, softly. She ruffled Myrina's ears, and the two of them together slipped out. Clarke and Ajax were left standing still and afraid and warmed to the bones in the cool gloom of the tent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading and to everyone who commented on the last chapter: you are all SO KIND I love you and you have honestly kept me going as I battled my way through episode summaries and logistical questions and the realisation every dæmon bar, like, TWO has been accidentally named after Greek mythology yee haw
> 
> Ch3 coming after I challenge Covid-19 to a bare knuckle back street fist fight (stay safe everyone)


	3. here is the earth, poisoned

He fell to the ground when it happened. All of the breath was crushed from his lungs, and he twitched and gasped and swore, because somebody was _touching_ them! Somebody was _hurting her_ —

He tasted blood in his mouth. It wasn't his own.

‘Murphy?’ he heard Clarke say, though her voice was coming from very far away. There was a hand on his shoulder—not Clarke, black-lined eyes: Octavia.

He choked out: 'They've got their hands on her.’

‘Who has their hands on her?’ Octavia asked, confused.

He was drawing a crowd; he hated it. Octavia and Clarke together ducked under one of each of his arms, and they began to half-carry, half-drag him into the tent—the Commander’s tent, he noticed, dully, though she didn't appear to be in. They sat him on a chair and let him curl into himself with a groan. Ghostly fingers pressed into his sides, squeezed hard and cruel around his ribs, and he felt the overwhelming urge to vomit. He did not vomit. It was the Commander’s tent, and he wanted to keep his head.

‘Murphy,’ Octavia was saying, her hand still on his shoulder. ‘Murphy, what’s the matter? Who’s touching her?’

‘Shit, shit, shit,’ said Clarke. She began to pace, holding out her arm for Ajax to land. ‘This isn't good. If they've captured Sive, that might mean they have Bellamy. _Crap_.’

Murphy felt dizzy with the awful feeling, but not so dizzy that Clarke’s words didn't register in his panic-addled brain.

'Wait,’ he said. ‘Bellamy?’

‘Clarke,’ said Ajax, a warning in his tone. Clarke stopped pacing.

‘Clarke,’ said Murphy, sitting up, ignoring the fist inserted into his chest and clenched around his heart. ‘Clarke, what are you talking about? Do you… do you know where Sive is?’

Clarke froze where she stood, and schooled her face into a cool mask. ‘Sive is in Mount Weather,’ she told him. ‘She’s been helping Bellamy infiltrate the mountain and disable the acid fog.’

Murphy used the sides of the chair to push himself up and to his feet. If he wasn't left so weak and boneless and de-toothed by the shadow-hands that were wrapped like vices around his soul, he was sure he would have lunged for her. ‘She has been in Mount Weather this whole time—this whole time while I’ve been going out of my fucking _mind_ —and you didn't _tell me_?’

‘This is _why_ we didn't tell you!’ Clarke cried. ‘We knew you would react like this—come on, Murphy! You know you’d have been unhappier knowing that she was somewhere where you couldn't see her, couldn't help her. That she was in danger!’

‘No, Clarke. You and Raven have been on the radio to Bellamy this whole time—I could have SPOKEN TO HER! I HAVEN'T SPOKEN TO HER IN WEEKS, I THOUGHT— I—’

‘Hush, Murphy,’ Octavia said, stonily. ‘Come on. We’ll find her tomorrow, when we attack the Mountain.’

‘He’s not going to the Mountain if he can't be calm and rational about this,’ Clarke said, sharply.

‘Oh, in no scenario am I not going to that goddamn mountain if Sive is in there!’ Murphy nearly toppled over from the force of his own yell. ‘I can't believe you would have kept this from me, you little—’

‘And this is _why_! Don't you get it, Murphy? You’re unstable and you’re volatile and nobody ever seems to know for sure whose side you’re even on, other than your own!’ 

‘Don’t go making _me_ into the bad guy, Clarke, just because _you_ can't come to terms with the fact that you’ve killed people, too—’

‘—You have to be a soldier, Murphy, a team player—’

Murphy laughed, rough, harsh, furious. ‘Oh, a team player? Is that so? Yeah, well, when the hell have any of you ever been on _my_ team, Clarke?’

The flap to the tent opened. ‘What is going on?’ Lexa demanded. ‘Clarke?’

‘I was just leaving,’ said Murphy. He hissed, and stumbled, as a distant pain cracked across his ribs. ‘If I’m dead in the morning, I’ll know who to blame.’

He pushed past Lexa and her tiger, and out into the camp. Then he kicked the side of the pole so hard the Commander’s tent shook with it; a few of her hulking bodyguards sent black looks his way, but he was still dæmonless and the thought of touching him still horrified them.

Then he swallowed another cry where it threatened to tear free from his throat. He had little choice but to endure it, the intrusion of that grasping, wriggling phantom grip around his heart, the jerking, tearing, chilling feeling of unwelcome hands and snatching fingers. He was dæmonless, and she was frightened and in pain, and thanks to Clarke, she probably didn't even know he was here. Sive probably didn't even know how much he had been missing her.

He had thought she was _gone_ , gone forever, and Clarke had looked him in the eye and _lied_ and let him believe it. Part of him wanted to storm back in there, because a part of him regretted how he hadn't, in his shock and fury, spelled out to her exactly how he felt, exactly what she had done to him. He thought the least she deserved was to hear it. As it was, though, he didn't think he had the words for it.

‘Murphy,’ Octavia said, appearing next to him. She had gotten awfully good at sneaking up on people lately.

‘Leave me alone,’ he hissed.

‘Shut up, Murphy,’ said Apollo. ‘Clarke didn't tell us your dæmon was in there, either.’

‘I should fucking hope not,’ Murphy said, or tried to; his voice broke in two as he felt another phantom blow against his side. He clutched at it, grimacing, and Octavia reached out a hand to steady him.

‘Do you think they have Bellamy?’ she asked, in a small voice.

‘I don't know,’ Murphy admitted. ‘I don't even know what they're doing with Sive. I just— I just know when they're touching her. I can feel it.’

Octavia nodded, sombre. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay. Let’s get you to your tent, then. I can stay with you if you want.’

‘No!’ Murphy hissed. ‘No. I want— I want to be alone.’

Octavia smiled a little, thinly, and she looked just like Bellamy when she did. ‘No you don't,’ she said. ‘Come on.’

And with that, she slung his arm around her shoulders again. He let her lead him back to his tent; but she didn’t stay for long, warning him to yell if he thought anything else was happening to Sive, or if he had any inkling of what might be happening to Bellamy.

After she had gone, Murphy allowed himself a few tears—but only a few. _At least she didn't leave me,_ a small voice whispered, at the very back of his mind. _At least she didn't choose to leave._

The phantom pains were gone. A very small part of him missed them; because now, he couldn't feel her any longer. Now, he had no idea if she was there. He crawled out of the tent, and lay on his back on the ground, looking up at the luxury of stars scattered across the night, and it was all he could do not to scream obscenities at them where they blinked mute and innocent far above.

* * *

‘He tried to _kill_ you?’ Sive gasped. 

‘Yeah. He took me hostage and tried to hang me in the dropship,’ Bellamy said. ‘With the seatbelt.’

Sive sniffed a little, trotting alongside Juno on her much shorter legs. ‘Good for him.’

‘Sive,’ Juno said, sternly.

‘Hold on, Raven,’ said Bellamy. He pressed the keycard to the sensor. It blinked red. ‘Shit.'

‘ _What is it?_ ’ Raven asked, her voice turned tinny by the radio.

Bellamy tried once more, but Lovejoy’s keycard again failed to open the door. ‘I’m gonna have to find another way into the acid fog room. I’ll call you back,’ he said. 

‘Bellamy,’ said Sive.

'What, Sive?’ Bellamy tugged off his cap and ran his fingers anxiously through his hair.

‘Someone's coming. I can hear them. Quick!’ Sive leapt up onto the railing, peering around the corner.

‘Hey!’ a voice called. Footsteps clanged on the metal gridding of the floor. ‘That’s not Lovejoy!’

Bellamy ran. Juno jogged ahead, teeth pulled into a snarl, and Sive leapt up the steps nimbly, hanging overhead from the railings like a little monkey, hair standing on end in fright. ‘Quickly, Bellamy!’

Bellamy powered up the steps, ducking as shots rang through the air; he felt one whizz only inches past his ear, and his cap went flying. Once he reached the top of the stairs, he ducked around another corner, chest burning with the sudden and extreme exertion. He pressed himself against the wall, gun ready at his side, not daring to move a muscle.

The guard came hurtling around the corner. Bellamy struck. He took the butt of the shotgun, and slammed it, hard, against the side of the guard’s head. He dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes, a heavy rolling thump. His badger dæmon skidded a little, before collapsing bonelessly a few feet away.

Bellamy crouched down, and grabbed the guard’s keycard from the chain on his belt, nearly dizzy with adrenaline.

Then he heard the cock of a gun, and Juno let out a sharp strangled growl; Bellamy felt the reverberation of a pain in his neck, and all along his ear.

He turned around, hands up, eyes wide.

He was staring down the gun of a second guard, whose lemur dæmon had Juno in a chokehold, teeth tearing into one of her silky ears. ‘Drop your weapon, and the keycard,’ the guard barked.

Then, a black blur launched herself at the guard with a high-pitched cry of rage. The guard shrieked, and dropped the gun, which clattered to the floor by Bellamy’s feet. The lemur let go of Juno, and Bellamy sucked in a breath for both of them, while the guard yelled and shook his hand in vain to try and dislodge the little monster that had sunk her teeth into it. The lemur was babbling, nearly incoherent, as Sive dangled from the man’s bloody hand by the teeth, her paws scrabbling and her eyes wild. 

The guard tried to grab her with his other hand, but she bit that one, too, and snarling like a wildcat, launched herself at his face. He ducked away with a yell, and in all the commotion Bellamy heard Sive cry, clear as a bell, ‘BELLAMY! JUNO! RUN, you IDIOTS!’

They didn't need to be told twice; Bellamy launched himself down the steps, and sprinted for the door to the acid fog room. The keycard blinked green, and the door hissed open.

There was no sign of Sive.

‘Bellamy, we have to go!’ Juno cried. ‘We’ll go back for her! We have to disable the fog!’

Bellamy waited five, six, seven more seconds. Sive did not appear. Feeling almost as terrible as if he was leaving his own Juno behind, Bellamy slammed the door shut, and leaned against it, breathing heavily.

'We need to disable the fog,’ said Juno, but she sounded much less urgent about it. She nuzzled her head into his hand. ‘We’ll go back for her. We will.’

‘Yeah,’ said Bellamy, rising to stand straight, and fishing in his pocket for the radio to call Raven. ‘We will.’

* * *

Bellamy’s hair still smelled of chemicals and smoke by the time he made it to the Harvest Chamber. He opened the girl, Echo’s, cage first, but let her open the rest as he and Juno headed straight into the room which held the Reaper’s dæmons.

There was Baby, her wings bright and blue and beautiful again, fluttering up in excitement when she saw him.

But Sive was nowhere to be seen.

* * *

‘I am _doing_ the best I _can_!’ Clarke was trembling. Murphy would have almost felt sorry for her, if he wasn't furious with her. And even then, he still had chosen to follow her, wordlessly, as she ran down into the bowels of the mountain, into the dark labyrinth of mines which dripped and echoed and smelled faintly of blood and sulphur. She had staggered once, twice, on the way, and petty as it might have been, he hadn't offered her a hand up.

‘Yeah, well, it's not good enough,’ said Octavia, with a char-eyed sneer.

‘I really don't think we have time for this.’ Murphy interjected. Clarke and Octavia each looked just about ready to throttle the other, and Ajax and Apollo were engaged in a similar stand-off, one in which Murphy didn't think there could be any clear winner. ‘Is there any other way into the mountain? And,’ he paused, as Fox’s blank gaze seemed to drill holes in the side of his skull where her corpse lay, bloodied and limp, in the skip, ‘is there any other way out?’

Before either of them could answer, the door swung open. Light streamed into the dank darkness of the mine.

Bellamy, Jasper, Monty, and Hazmat-Suit cast long shadows in the doorway, their dæmons either on their person or at their feet.

‘Excellent,’ said Murphy. ‘Right on time.’ Then he stood back, sullen, staying out of the way as hugs and explanations were exchanged, or at least he tried to—because Bellamy came forward, arms lifting as if he was going to embrace Murphy, too, before he seemed to think better of it.

There was a strange expression on his face, an unhappy twist to his mouth. Murphy didn't like it one bit. ‘Bellamy, where is she?’ he demanded, but he thought that a part of him already knew the answer.

Bellamy shook his head. Juno ducked hers. ‘We don't know,’ he whispered. ‘We don't know where she is.'

* * *

The bars were suffocating her. She did her best to push her panic down, hold it back, because there wasn't the time nor the space for it. Sive circled the tiny cage, sucking in deep breaths, trying to stop her toes from clawing at the metal floor. She felt so cramped and confined and so deeply unhappy to be back behind bars that a part of her shamefully wondered if she would have been better off not having been freed at all; if she would be better off not knowing what it was she had been missing.

She kept feeling... echoes, strange and distant as shouts heard from underwater. There was an unsettling feeling of fear thrumming just under her skin, a fear that she didn't think was her own. ‘John,’ she whispered. ‘What are you up to, John?’

In a feeble attempt at distraction, she poked her snout out through the bars, and looked up at a dark, dim painting of a man with wild white hair tearing the flesh off a smaller, white and bloodied figure. A child, maybe? The man's teeth were bared and his eyes maddened.

‘I can't let you out,’ said Dante, stiffly. His goldfinch dæmon hadn't spoken a word since Cage Wallace had placed Sive and her cage in the white room, telling his father that he would come back for them both. ‘Pace all you like, if you need, but I won't let you out.’

‘That’s a horrible painting,’ said Sive. ‘I hate it. Why have you hung it up?’

Dante’s jaw was stiff. ‘It’s Goya. _Saturn_. Sublime, no?’

Sive had no idea what _sublime_ meant. She sniffed. ‘No.’

Dante continued: ‘See how the man has no dæmon. He is Saturn, father of the gods. The child is his son, whom he feared would grow up to overthrow him. So he killed and ate him before that could happen.’

‘No dæmon? Like you take the dæmons from the Reapers?’ said Sive, flattening him with an accusatory stare.

‘We do what we must, little one. Where is your human? He is no Reaper. You’re much too lively for that.’ Dante turned away. He looked too still to be peaceful. His hands were clasped in his lap. ‘I’ve been told you were assisting the man who infiltrated our home and disabled the Veil, but you are not his dæmon.’

‘The Veil? You mean the Acid Fog?’ Sive perked up. ‘So he managed to do it?’

‘I wouldn't celebrate,’ Dante warned. ‘The Commander took the deal. The Veil is gone, but we have still won.’

‘You don't know that,’ said Sive, though she was the one who sounded unsure.

Dante smiled, but there was no joy in it. ‘No. You have lost, and we have won, but I assure you, there is no victory in it. There is no victory in any of this.’

Then, the door opened with a bang. Sive whipped around, to see Bellamy and Clarke, Juno and Ajax, all standing in the doorway, armed to the teeth and half-mad with desperation.

‘Sive!’ Juno cried, and Bellamy had rushed over to open her cage in a heartbeat. She sprung out before he had time to even step back. She never, _ever_ , wanted to even see a cage again.

‘Sive,’ said Juno, low, urgent, frightened. ‘Sive, Murphy’s here. He’s somewhere in the mountain. He’s looking for you.’

* * *

Murphy saw her in every shadow, in every corner, in little darting movements in the corner of his eye that nearly gave him whiplash from turning his head so fast. But there was never anything, or anyone, there.

He wondered if she could be in the next room over, and he wouldn't know. He wondered if she could be right in front of him, and he wouldn't know. Or, worse: maybe _she_ wouldn't know _him_. Maybe she wouldn't recognise him at all. When his mother had been really drunk, had sunken into one of her really black spells, she hadn't always known him. He would have taken any level of snarled, spat-out insults, cleaned up any amount of piss or puke, washed all of the dishes and tiptoed around the apartment; he would have taken all of it, over _that_ , over blank, unseeing eyes, a wrinkle in her brow, over ‘...Who the hell are you? Where— where’s Alex?’ slurred over the glistening brown lip of a bottle. He would have taken anything over that.

‘Murphy! Keep up!’ Jasper hissed, his little gecko perched atop his head. He was holding the girl, Maya’s, hand. Octavia had ran on ahead, her feet smacking against the concrete floor.

Murphy hurried after them, and ignored the shadows that tried to trick him into looking for something where there was nothing. She wasn't here.

When they reached Level Five, and Maya finally got her hazmat-suit off, her little ladybug dæmon floated up to meet Murphy’s eye. ‘She’s in here somewhere,’ he promised. ‘Bellamy would never have let anything happen to her. She was the one who distracted the guard and let him escape to disable the Veil. She’s okay. They probably just have her in a cage somewhere. I promise.’

Murphy just nodded. His jaw ached where he had been clenching it. He could imagine Sive would think herself very heroic after that stunt. He personally preferred the term "stupid".

Jasper and Maya said a tearful goodbye, and Octavia and Murphy stood united in their awkwardness, averting their eyes. To his great displeasure, Murphy was shafted into hiding in the closet with Maya and Octavia.

He would really rather have not stayed with Maya, and her earnest, kind little dæmon. Something about the two of them made his chest hurt, and filled his nerves with dread. They had spent time with Sive, here in the Mountain. They were worried about Sive, too. It ought to have brought him comfort, but really it just made him more afraid.

He wished he could feel her. He wished he could know that she was okay. What the hell had she been thinking, throwing herself at the guard like that?

Then, a kissing couple stumbled straight into their hiding spot. Then, they saw Murphy, in his battle-armour, and Octavia, with the black-smeared eyes of a Grounder, and then, they yelled: ‘OUTSIDERS!’

And then, Murphy found out just what Sive had been thinking, because then he shoved the raging Octavia back into Maya’s restraining arms, and ran straight down the hall to barrel headfirst into the pair of armed guards.

Sive wasn't in the closet, and wasn’t elsewhere on Level Five. Maya’s dæmon had said Sive was in cage. So, Murphy would go to where the cages were.

* * *

Sive was not in the room where they had taken him. The wall at the end was lined with cages, all filled with dæmons, but Sive wasn't one of them. All of his earlier fears had melted away; he would have known straight away if she was there. He was sure of it.

Murphy’s ribs ached where he had been punched, but he continued to thrash as the guards pressed him to the wall, his cheek crushed against the cold concrete, rough hands trapping his own in cuffs tight enough to hurt. Next to him, Raven’s lower lip jutted out in defiance, and her dark eyes met his own; she nodded in the silent promise that she, too, wasn't going to give in without one hell of a fight. Argo was with the other dæmons, locked in their cages along the far wall. They were shrieking and flapping in a wild riot of colour. That was what frightened Murphy the most. The terror of the imprisoned souls filled up the room like rising water. It grew very hard to breathe.

When they picked Raven, their hands grabbing at her shoulders, he lunged, kicking his feet wildly at the stoic, silent guards. It wasn't a survivor’s move. He didn't care. He felt like he was teetering off the side of some cliff; he felt half-crazed with it. She was _here_ , somewhere, but _where_?

‘Where _is_ she?!’ he yelled. ‘What the hell have you done with her?!’

One of the guards raised his hand, staring Murphy down. ‘You're the one who was yelling about a missing dæmon.’ He took a step forward. ‘You’re the one with the sable? The little black _rat_?’ His raised hand bore the bandaged stub of half a missing finger, and Murphy, in the midst of all his blinding terror, in the spaces between the rapid pounding of his heart, almost laughed.

Of course she had bitten his finger off.

‘We’ll take this one first,’ said the guard, and Murphy spat at him. They moved from Raven to him, and though he kicked and punched wildly, it was three against one, and all of them handled him like they had a grudge. Before they forced him down onto the table and strapped a metal restraint around his neck, he caught Raven’s eye.

Another nod, big dark eyes, tears. He didn't know what that one meant, but he thought he could guess.

Then they started drilling, and he stopped thinking about anything much at all.

* * *

It had been all Bellamy and Clarke could do, to convince her not to go looking for Murphy—to go looking for _trouble_ , as Ajax had put it. ‘If we see him on the monitors, we’ll know where he is,’ Monty had promised her, his bumblebee dæmon Bernard humming reassuringly. ‘Then you can go looking for him.’

They had not banked on him being in the dorm, in the middle of the impromptu operating theatre, the impromptu massacre. But in the control room, airless with tension, lit blue by flashing monitors, Sive knew straight away when something had gone terribly wrong.

Dante was stiff as a board, his goldfinch dæmon perched on his shoulder, his jaw working, his eyes hard as rock, while Clarke paved the length of the room, restless, fingers trembling, Ajax silently watching her go. Bellamy stood ready, Juno’s ears pricked by his side. Monty hunched over the computer, Bernard crawling over his hair, down his arm, resting on the back of his hand where it hovered over the keypad. And Sive suddenly knew. She had been feeling the echoes of John’s fear and desperation all evening, but only dimly, like a shout through a closed door, an echo from another room. But now, where she stood on the desk, she felt some spark of sharper panic deep in her belly. Her guts swooped with sick anticipation.

‘Oh my God,’ Clarke whispered, staring at something on one of the multitude of glowing blue monitors in the room. 

‘Bellamy,’ Sive said, unsure and frightened and hating herself for wanting his comfort, and then—

A rising pressure in her head. A terrible jagged pain flared to life and coursed like lightning down her sides, from her ears down to the nails on her paws. They were _hurting him_ ! She sank down on the table, and let out a yelp; she couldn't feel his pain in the way that he felt it, but the shadow of it was enough. That was enough. And she couldn't be there—she couldn't _help_ him—

‘Is that Murphy?’ Bellamy said, horrified, staring at the monitor. He was thrashing, thrashing to no avail, where he was strapped to the table. The picture was grainy, the room ill-lit, and yet he was unmistakable. At the sight of Murphy struggling against his restraints a flood of old, bitter, half-buried images resurfaced in Bellamy’s memory, snapshots of another time when Murphy had fought like that, of another time when Bellamy had watched and done nothing. He felt like he was going to be sick.

‘Sive,’ Juno said, low and urgent, padding over to her where she writhed on the table, crying out; when Juno gently nosed her side, it didn't appear that she could feel it. ‘Bellamy, we have to do something!’

Bellamy grabbed a walkie-talkie from the bench. ‘Tell them to stop!’ he demanded, shoving it into Dante’s stony face. ‘ _Now_!’

‘I won't do that,’ said Dante. His goldfinch cocked her head, and shifted from foot to foot, restlessly, uneasily; it was a strange contrast to Dante’s stillness, his expressionless face, his blank eyes; the tendons on his neck stood ropy and tense with whatever roiling emotion he was trying hard to hide.

Sive screeched in pain, her back arching. The goldfinch winced, and Bernard rose from the back of Monty’s hand to join Juno in her silent, helpless vigil to the torture, hovering over Sive’s trembling form. ‘Monty,’ he said. ‘Please, hurry.’

On the monitor, Murphy’s mouth was open in a scream that none of them could hear.

Clarke snatched the walkie-talkie from Bellamy’s hand. ‘Carl Emerson,’ she said, fury bubbling under her voice. ‘Mount Weather security detail. Come in.’ She paused. Bellamy wondered at the back of his mind how she could be so decisive when he felt so faint, his limbs thrumming with nerves; a part of him felt like _he_ was the one being tortured. ‘Get the radio to the president,’ she ordered.

A weak cry from the table, and, as if he was drawn by some invisible force, some unstoppable gravity, Bellamy found himself walking over to Sive, and without thinking too much about it, slipping his hand beneath her silky fur and picking her up, cradling her close to his heart. She shuddered wildly in his grip, and he ran a finger down her back, rubbed the soft downy fur behind her ears, in the vain hope that it might soothe her, or maybe that it might soothe the absent space where Murphy ought to be. He ignored Ajax’s gasp, and Bernard’s hiss of shock; they wouldn't understand, they didn't know, and besides, he wasn't sure he could explain it. Sive felt very small and light in his grip, smaller than a cat. She squirmed a little, and let out a feeble moan. Bellamy couldn't bring himself to look at the monitor. He just kept stroking Sive’s head, and he suspected the rhythmic motion was to settle his own racing heart as much as it was to offer some cold comfort to the boy on the operating table, or to the trembling dæmon in Bellamy’s grip.

‘Sive,’ he whispered. ‘Hush, Sive. We’ll save him.’

The rest of the world slipped away, or at least, that was what it felt like. It was only him, and Sive, and Juno, and somewhere in the mountain, strapped to the table, Murphy. There was a strange and new and delicate connection of touch between them, thin and threadbare with time and distance and hate and fear, battered and beaten but persisting all the same. Bellamy only hoped that Murphy could sense it, that Murphy knew. From the way Sive drew close to his touch, restless even half-awake, he could tell that she did.

He needed them both to get the message, the message he didn't have words for, and he only hoped that they could still hear him, in this still and hushed moment where the four of them were all that was left on the earth.

Then, a sharp short bang, a horrid, ragged gasp: Clarke had shot Dante in the chest. The world came rushing back in. 

Dante sank to the ground, his death rapid and unceremonious, his wheezing slowing to a stop, his hand clutching in vain at the spreading poppy of blood on his neatly-pressed shirt. The goldfinch fluttered up; when she burst into gold, she left a brief shadow behind, like the smoke imprint of a firework lingers in the sky for just one silent moment after the sparks have blown out.

'Listen to me very carefully,’ Clarke said into the radio. ‘I will not stop until my people are free. If you don't let them go, I will irradiate Level Five.’

‘Clarke,’ Ajax said, soft.

She brushed away tears, and turned back to Bellamy, and Sive, Monty and Bernard, and Juno, and Dante Wallace’s body cooling on the floor. Her knuckles were white where they clutched they radio, and her resolve was set in iron.

* * *

Murphy didn’t have enough left in him to scream, didn't have enough left in him to fight; he had stopped struggling against the restraints what felt like an eternity ago, and since then it had just been red-hot pain and the vibrations of the drill in his hip rattling up through his ribs, shaking his very heart loose. He had been fighting for so long; suddenly, nothing seemed more appealing to him than to have a rest. To go to sleep. To do what he had wanted to do all along, and tell this stupid awful hateful earth to kiss his ass. It would be so easy, too; there was a darkness lapping like water at the sides of the table on which he lay, a hungry darkness, a darkness that promised in sweet whispers only peace, and the warm, enfolding comfort of sleep. It would be so easy to slip into that silky, whispering water. It would be so easy to let it all go.

Was somebody touching Sive?

He remembered how the same darkness had risen to cover his mouth and his nose, had filled his eyes and his lungs with ink, when he had hanged from that tree. But that was another life; that was another Murphy. That was a kid who was afraid to die.

There was a ghost hand around his shoulders. Some phantom stroked his hair. Somebody was touching Sive.

He felt suddenly alert again, and the sleeping water receded a little, hissing and unhappy. That was not a good thing, because his hips were on fire and he couldn't feel his toes; yet suddenly, now that he knew he was going to die, a defiant, bratty, spiteful little piece of him rose up from within and showed its teeth.

She was there; somebody was touching her. Somebody was _holding_ her, like Murphy would have held her. She wasn't alone. He wasn't alone.

The room was dimming quickly; the doctors and the guards and the people chained like dogs to the walls faded and distant as shadows, but Sive wasn't alone. Somebody was holding her close, somebody whispered words of comfort to her. They weren't alone.

He forced his eyes open, forced himself awake. He spat at the doctor at his side. And if death was there, he would spit at him, too. This stupid awful hateful earth would just have to put up with him, at least for a little bit longer, because if death was there, Murphy refused to go gently.

* * *

‘I did it,’ said Monty. He didn't look triumphant; he looked stricken. ‘All we have to do is pull this.’ He pointed, hand trembling, to a metal lever. ‘Hatches and vents will open, and the scrubbers will reverse, letting in outside air.’

For a long moment, the whirr of machinery and the blinking beeps of computers was all they could hear in the room. Bellamy looked at the lever. Bellamy looked at Monty. Bellamy looked at Clarke. He still held Sive close to his chest. Juno rubbed her head against his leg.

Movement on the monitors.

‘He’s gonna blow the door,’ Clarke realised; she lifted her gun to face the door.

Bellamy saw on the other monitor the white and tan guards press a familiar dark-clothed, dark-haired girl to the ground; Apollo flapped wildly, just out of reach. And here, in his arms, Sive let out a sigh. She wasn't moving. She felt lighter with every passing second, as if she was already beginning to disintegrate, to fade out of the world.

‘We have to save them. We have to save him.’ Bellamy’s voice sounded thin and reedy, even to his own ears.

There were children here, their dæmons flitting through the concrete halls, echoing with laughter, unsettled and free.

But Sive wasn't moving.

* * *

Bellamy had learned a trick to put himself to sleep when he was small; he would imagine the very best future possible, map all the wonderful ways his life could go, like conjuring up his own personal bedtime story. He had fallen out of the habit after his mother was floated. He had all but forgotten it on the ground.

And yet, in the hollow belly of the mountain, he found himself slipping back into such childish things as hopes and dreams sweet enough to put him to sleep, as if he could bring some better future into being by sheer force of will.

And so:

‘You asked me,’ Bellamy will say, after all of this is over, ‘if I wouldn’t have done the same thing.’

Murphy will look at him, his strong profile flickering in the firelight. His hair will be falling into his eyes, and his shoulders will be hunched against the cold, and the warm orange glow of the bonfire might soften all of his hard edges. Bellamy will want to huddle closer. Bellamy will want to wrap an arm around those cold shoulders. Bellamy will want to gather Murphy to his chest so that he is never cold again.

(Even here, even in Bellamy’s secret dreams, he doesn't know if Murphy would let him. He doesn't know if Murphy would even forgive him, for his cruelty, his stupidity, his blindness and his hate. He hardly dares to hope that Murphy will look him in the eye, much less—)

(Murphy had done cruel, stupid, hateful things, too.)

(Maybe that was the lesson here. That none of them were perfect; that sometimes, none of them were even good.)

(Or: maybe there were no lessons here. Maybe this was it, maybe it was just blood and pain and loss, and those offered up no lessons to him now. Maybe they had been right, on the Ark, a lifetime ago. Maybe the earth _was_ poisoned, after all.)

Sive will be cuddled up to Juno, the two of them dozing together, enjoying the closeness, Juno’s chin tucked over Sive’s shoulders, Sive’s tail twitching in delight. Murphy will look at him, and Bellamy will remember how he had flinched away and called him a monster; as if Murphy had chosen to be soulless; as if he had cast Sive away. Murphy will look at him and the fire will glitter like stars in his eyes.

‘Done what?’ Murphy will ask, in a slow honey drawl.

‘Given her up,’ Bellamy will say. ‘Chosen our people over Juno. Done… done the right thing.’

Bellamy will remember:

_Murphy sat on the floor coiled to spring, mouth tugged back into a snarl, animalistic; as if he sought to make up for the dæmon he now lacked. ‘You try choosing between your soul and the people who strung you up to die for something you didn’t do, then banished you. You try having Juno torn away from you, and then you tell me that you wouldn’t have done the same, Bellamy.’_

‘I don't think I would have,’ Bellamy will say. ‘I don't know, but I don't think I would have done the right thing at all. How can you choose? Between your dæmon, your soul, and your people?’

He will pause. He will struggle to find the words. He won’t know if there _are_ any words for it, for what he has done.

‘How can you choose between saving the love you know and all of the loves you don't?’

The choice is easy. Is it selfish? Is it wrong?

Murphy will sigh, but his breath will shudder a little, like the breath one takes after a wracking sob. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know why we make these choices. But the earth keeps asking us to.’

The choice is his. And he will always choose Murphy. And he won't regret the choice; he’ll only regret that he had to make it to begin with.

And maybe Bellamy will not have to gather Murphy into his arms to keep him from the cold, because, in his most secret dreams, the ones he saves for the longest, darkest nights, it’s Murphy who opens his arms and takes Bellamy in instead.

And Juno will still be there. All of the blood on Bellamy’s hands will not have turned her away from him, like he fears it will. And Octavia will still be there, and Clarke, too. And he will be able to look at Jasper in the eye, and so will Monty. And together they can all stand tall to reckon with the mountain, with the height and the weight and the breath of it, with the rivers of blood that course through its halls and its narrow corridors, and that horrible room and that horrible lever like its dark and beating heart.

(Maybe, if he could hold this dream in his chest, hold the flickering fire and the warmth of arms meant not to hurt, he could live with it. They could all live with it; live still under the shadow of the poisoned mountain, live still upon the poisoned earth.)

* * *

Bellamy looked at Murphy, lying still and white on the operating table, and then he looked down at Sive, who had gone silent, who gasped out a puff of stardust. He put his right hand on the lever, and cradled Sive close to his chest with the left.

Clarke’s hand stopped him; she placed her’s, gloved, armoured for battle, atop his own. Ajax landed on Juno’s shoulders; Bellamy felt the ghost-weight of him atop his own. He drew in one deep breath.

‘Together,’ Clarke said.

They pulled the lever.

The radiation alarm sounded through the halls of Mount Weather like a death knell.

* * *

Moving like a man in a dream, Bellamy carried Sive to the dorm-turned-harvest-theatre, Juno trotting mutely at his side. He felt short of breath, even though he hadn't been running. Sive stirred on the way, but didn't say anything, her half-lidded eyes taking in the corpses they passed with more exhaustion than shock.

By the time they arrived, Abby had released Murphy from most of the restraints. She was helping him sit up as Bellamy and Clarke came in, but she passed him over to Bellamy as soon as she saw her daughter enter the room. 

Bellamy lifted one hand from Sive to support Murphy by the shoulders. His head lolled forward weakly, and he was so pale he looked grey. He lifted his head with what seemed a tremendous effort, and looked up at them. At both of them.

‘...Sive?’

Sive squirmed out of Bellamy's hands as if she’d been electrocuted, leaping into Murphy’s trembling arms, scrabbling up his chest, pressing her head against the spot where his heart still beat beneath his skin. ‘It’s you,’ she whispered, so low that only Bellamy and Murphy could hear her. ‘John, it’s you.’

And at that Murphy burst into tears. With one hand he clung to Bellamy like a limpet, and with the other, shaking wildly, he patted Sive on the back. His chest shuddered with his sobs, and then Sive was crying, too, and then Juno made a small unhappy noise and leapt up onto the table next to them to nuzzle into Murphy’s chest, to nudge in next to Sive, to lick Murphy on the cheek. Bellamy’s stomach did a little somersault—he could _feel_ where Juno was touching Murphy, and it was strange and new but it wasn't bad, it wasn't bad at all—and then two arms and one set of nipping teeth gathered Bellamy closer, pulling him down into the embrace. Bellamy closed his eyes, and he let himself sink into it, and somehow found that now he could breathe just fine. They must have looked a strange foursome, he thought, tucking Murphy’s head beneath his chin; gathered so closely together in the centre of the room that somebody looking in would not be able to tell whose dæmon was whose, or even whose limbs belonged to whom. Bellamy only wrapped his arms around Murphy tighter, afraid of what might happen when he let go; afraid that when he did, the scene would disintegrate all around him, and he would be back in the control room, back in the cages, or maybe back at the dropship, watching a boy with a blood-red seatbelt stuffed into his mouth hang dead from a tree.

‘It was you,’ Murphy said, voice thick, in between wracking sobs and terrible, full-body shakes and convulsions, and Bellamy was brought right back to the here and the now, the rusting dropship in the dark woods a relic of another man’s sins, another man’s life. He felt Sive nose into his throat from where she was sandwiched between them, and he felt the strange urge to stop the world from turning, even for just a few minutes, so he could lie with Murphy on the operating table and listen to him breathe.

Juno licked some of the tears from Murphy’s cheek. He was still mumbling, over and over, into Bellamy’s chest, breath warm and smelling of blood. ‘It was you, Bellamy, it was you. You were the one who helped us, when they—’

Bellamy hushed him. ‘I didn't do anything. Sive was in pain, you were in pain, I—’ he let out a shaky breath of his own, swallowed tears of his own. ‘I didn't know what else to do. I did all I knew to do.’

Murphy didn't say anything after that, just gathered Bellamy closer, gathered Sive closer, like he couldn't get close enough, like he wanted to crawl into Bellamy's chest and take root. Bellamy thought he might have let him. The four of them huddled there for a time that couldn't have been more than a minute before a red-eyed Abby asked to look over Murphy’s wounds, but it could have been an eternity. Only an eternity would have been enough.

Murphy held onto Sive like she was a lifeline. He didn't let her go even as Abby examined him. Bellamy thought Sive—or Murphy—would have been quite prepared to bite Abby had she tried.

Murphy sniffled where he sat. ‘Bell, your shirt.’ He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, gaunt eyes swollen and face blotchy. Bellamy’s white Mount Weather guard shirt had been smeared with tears and—very possibly—snot. Murphy was staring at it in dismay.

‘It’s an improvement,’ Bellamy told him, and despite it all, all the pain and the horror and the weight of the mountain bearing down on him from all sides, he grinned.

* * *

‘Raven complimented me very highly on the new limp,’ said Murphy, stashing his crutches to sit gingerly down against the log next to Bellamy, who jumped a little in alarm. It had been a long day of mission reports and Council meetings and talking Clarke down from taking off into the wilderness to live with the bears and the panthers, as if she could outrun what they had done. As if any of them could outrun what they had done. ‘She said it’s almost as good as her own,’ Murphy continued. ‘I told her we would just have to agree to disagree.’

‘Oh, I bet she did,’ Bellamy said, sitting up, and jostling sleepy Juno awake. ‘When did they let you out of medical?’

‘They didn't,’ said Sive, her voice muffled. She was curled up inside Murphy’s zipped-up jacket; she had stubbornly refused to leave that spot ever since they had been reunited, and if Murphy was being honest with himself, he had no intention of encouraging her to. ‘We escaped.’

‘We didn’t _escape_ ,’ Murphy objected. ‘We made an unauthorised exit.’

Bellamy chuckled at that, looking at Murphy with an intensity that inexplicably made Murphy want to run away, or at the very least, hide his face in his hands. He looked back to the camp, glittering with lights behind them. Arkadia had quietened down, now that the sun had set. Since the return from the Mountain, the camp had been buzzing with activity, agricultural plans and building efforts well underway. They still didn't know where they stood, exactly, with the Grounders, but Clarke was confident she could negotiate some sort of deal with Lexa. Murphy personally didn't doubt she would. There was little that could stop Clarke once she had her mind set on something, not even the terrifying Commander and her tigress-dæmon.

He swallowed some strange new lump in his throat. He didn't know why he still felt so fragile and out of place here, even with Sive back. He didn't know why he still felt like he didn't fit, even if his apparent heroics in the Mountain had softened people’s opinions of him. He still didn't know why he found it so hard to look at Bellamy after he had held Sive when they were tortured, and after he had hugged him on the operating table. He didn't know what this thick, tight, new knot of tension in his chest was, only that it made him restless and antsy and he felt like he wanted to shake Bellamy or punch him or—

‘Looks like things have gone back to the way they were between you two,’ Bellamy said, jerking Murphy out of his thoughts. He nodded to the lump in Murphy’s jacket. ‘I had worried that being apart for so long would have changed things. That neither of you would ever be the same.’

Murphy shrugged. ‘We can separate now. Sive can go further from me than any other dæmon in this camp can, and I won’t feel any pain. I think that's permanent. But she’s just as _clingy_ as ever—hey, stop nipping me!’

Juno snuffled a laugh. Sive emerged from within Murphy’s jacket and stalked over to where Juno sat, warming herself by the fire, with her little black head held high and not once glance back in Murphy’s direction.

Murphy’s mouth twitched. He refused to smile.

‘Yeah, Clarke was telling me. She and Ajax are already thinking of how you and Sive could make a fine team of spies.’

Murphy raised an eyebrow. ‘Plans for spies already? Does Clarke ever stop?’ Secretly, though, he was a little charmed. Sive the Spy. It had a ring to it. By the fire, Juno and Sive were chattering brightly—well, Juno was chattering. Sive was nearly bouncing out of her skin.

Bellamy sighed. ‘I don't think she _can_ stop. I don't think she knows how to.’

‘She’s afraid to, you mean,’ said Murphy. He had found that he wasn't angry with Clarke anymore. She had, in her own way, just been trying to do what she thought was right. If he was angry with her, he would have to be angry with the whole rotten earth; and he didn't think, funnily enough, that he was still equal to the task.

‘Yeah. Maybe. Aren't we all?’

Murphy rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. He didn't think he had an answer to that one. ‘We do what we have to,’ he said. ‘We do what we have to do in order to survive.’

'Is that enough?’ Bellamy asked.

Murphy let the sight of Sive frolicking in the firelight wash over him. He wanted to swallow this moment, frame it and keep it. He wanted to grab her and put her back inside his jacket where she belonged. Every time he saw her, he felt again that overwhelming relief that he had found her again. That he wasn't in this alone, not anymore. ‘It has to be enough,’ he said. ‘Anyway,’ he turned to Bellamy. ‘What about me and you? You’ve spent more time with me than I have, recently.’

The two of them watched Juno lick Sive on the head. Sive settled her twitching, and finally lay still in the cradle of Juno’s front paws. Juno’s chest puffed, and she looked extraordinarily pleased with herself.

‘Guess I have, if only technically,’ said Bellamy, and he nudged Murphy’s shoulder with his own. ‘It turns out I quite like you when I don't hate you.’

Murphy went very still. He didn't know what to say to that. _Thanks?_ No. That would be ridiculous. Why would he thank Bellamy for liking him? _I like you too?_ Not a chance; Murphy had covered him in snot only a day or so before, so he was pretty sure that Bellamy knew he liked him.

Bellamy didn’t wait for a response. He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. ‘Murphy,’ he said. ‘I need you to know. I’m sorry. For everything.’

Murphy shook his head, almost violently. ‘No. No— I’m the one who should be sorry.’

Neither of them had noticed the two dæmons had gone quiet, listening, until Sive let out a world-weary sigh. ‘ _John_ ,’ she said. Juno was grinning, and as they watched, rolled her eyes at them; a trick she had almost definitely picked up from Sive.

‘What?’ Murphy asked, defensively. His voice was hoarse, and he had no idea why. 

‘Juno,’ said Bellamy, at the exact same time. Murphy’s cheeks felt hot.

‘Both of you are idiots,’ said Juno, smugly, and with a very superior air she settled her head down on her paws. Sive scurried back over to Murphy, and climbed up his sleeve to sit on his shoulder. She leaned her head on top of his, and peered at Bellamy with her big black eyes.

‘Bellamy,’ she said, solemn. ‘What John is trying to say, is that he forgives you. And that we quite like you, too.’

Then, quick as lightning, she gave his hair a tug with her teeth, and trilled out a little laugh like annoying him was her greatest joy in life. Murphy suspected it might very well be. He swatted her away. ‘Stop pulling Sive, you know how I hate it,’ he said, but he couldn't keep the fondness out of his voice. Sive ducked away, and had escaped back into Juno’s warm embrace before Murphy could catch her.

Then, Bellamy had his hand on Murphy’s cheek.

Murphy went very still, again, half-afraid Bellamy would take his hand away, and half-afraid he wouldn't. He turned to face him. Bellamy was wearing the gentle smile that Murphy loved; eyes squinting and warm, lips closed, the corners tugged up almost reluctantly, as if he was smiling against his better judgment, but smiling all the same. He kept his rough palm on Murphy’s cheek. His thumb ran up and down the shell of Murphy’s ear.

It was Murphy who leaned in and pressed his lips to Bellamy’s, quick and afraid. His chest almost burst open: Bellamy kissed him back. A second hand rose to Murphy’s other cheek, a second thumb cradling the line of his jaw, and Murphy caught him by the shoulders, tracing the hard line of them, catching the weight of Bellamy as he drew close. It all felt solid and safe and steady as coming home, Bellamy’s lips on his as unshakable as the ground that slowly turned beneath them.

The kiss was short, a little fumbled, tentative on both sides, and after a moment it turned into a hug; Murphy clung to Bellamy’s shoulders as tight as he could. He felt almost like he was going to cry again, and he had been certain that he was all cried out.

When they drew apart, Bellamy smiled wider, as if he was the one who couldn't quite believe it. He still hadn’t removed one of his hands from where it rested on the side of Murphy’s face, and as they settled back against the log the hand slipped up into his hair. Murphy found himself leaning into the gentle touch of it. Bellamy kept it there, in Murphy's hair, as they sat as close as they could without being in each other’s laps, and Murphy had to take a moment to remind himself that this was real. He had been starved of all warmth for so long that he had forgotten what it was that he was missing. Now that he had it again, now that people would touch him again, would look at him again, he almost wasn’t sure what to do with it. He almost wasn't sure who he was when he wasn't at war with the world; and he certainly wasn't sure if he wouldn't blink and wake up back in the Grounder prison-camp, or back in the airless dropship, or back under the Mountain with a drill in his hip and his dæmon lost to the wind.

Bellamy kissed the side of his head, just above his temple, feather-light. ‘We’ll be alright,’ he murmured.

‘Yeah. Yeah, I think we will,’ said Murphy.

Then, the hand that was carding through Murphy's hair paused in its soft ministrations. Bellamy’s eyes gleamed with mischief, before he gave a gentle tug on a lock of hair he had caught in his fingers, and a laugh tripped up and out of his throat.

‘Jesus, Sive,’ Murphy grumbled, and both of them turned to see Sive’s head pop out from out of the tangle of limbs by the fire that now comprised both her and Juno, ears pricked at the sound of her name, 'you’ve been a very bad influence on him.’

Sive's nose twitched, and she gave a pleased little nod. ‘Good.’

Murphy tried to suppress his laugh, and failed, making a strange strangled hiccup of a noise. Bellamy smirked, and dropped the offending hand to squeeze Murphy’s shoulder. They stayed there, just the four of them, until the fire had sunk into red embers and the stars had all tiptoed out.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhh!! Fin!!! This chapter was a hefty one (may or may not have some gaping plot holes with regards to canon I don't know I pretend I do not see it) and yes I tried not to make the ending soppy and gooey but I’m only human and we're in a global pandemic so maybe we deserve a bit of goo. 
> 
> A big big thank you for reading to the end, and an even bigger thank you to everyone who has left kudos or a comment, and an even bigger, gigantic, humongous thank you to hopskipaway and blueparacosm who have both been so consistently lovely and supportive over this little rough and unfinished and kind of niche fic. It is so so so nice not to be writing into a void, and to be getting any response at all, never mind ones so kind and thoughtful, blew up my stupid little brain! <3

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Sive and the Spy](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25172845) by [sirfeit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sirfeit/pseuds/sirfeit)




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